


Base metal

by LaboriousScholastic



Category: Isaac Newton - Fandom, Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Baroque, M/M, Physics, Religion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-01
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2020-11-09 06:50:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20849279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaboriousScholastic/pseuds/LaboriousScholastic
Summary: Isaac Newton is a genius. But he made one mistake. The name of this mistake is Sebastian.





	1. Chapter 1

"Your tea, Professor Newton."  
"Thank you, Sebastian."  
"Do you require anything else, sir?"  
"I only require time and focus. Leave and let me work."  
"Yes, sir."  
The manservant silently stepped out of the room, leaving Isaac to his thoughts. How different his life might have turned out if he hadn't, in that fatefull night... But he didn't have time to ponder his decisions of yore. If he lost himself in that train of thought again, he would just waste another valuable day, a day not dedicated to his ultimate puporse: Beating death, and by beating death, beating that devil.  
"This time, I will add the mercury only after the effluvium has evaporated," he thought, while he heated up the apparatus in his laboratory.


	2. Chapter 2

Fluffy. He might have been lot of things, but he wasn't fluffy.  
Sebastian was annoyed, the kind of annoyance that could only be fixed by tucking on his clothes and chasing away specks of dust till his dress looked absolutely perfect.  
He might like fluffy things, but he wasn't a fluffy thing himself. Absolutely not. In no way.  
Sebastian glanced at a reflective surface, and tried to tuck his unruly strands of hair where they belonged.  
Yet, somehow, it was his personal curse that his victims, in their moments of deepest desperation, looked at him and thought of... fluffyness.  
"I'll call you Sebastian. After the kitten I found as a child, and played with, till my mother discovered it and drowned it."  
How many of his souls had named him after lost pets? Twenty, thirty? Probably more.  
And he hated it, absolutely hated it, each and every time that man addressed him using the name of his darned drowned kitten.


	3. 1662 - That day

It had been love at first sight.  
Love? No, not really. Appetite. Hunger. Longing. Desire.  
And not first sight. First whiff. The first tiny speck of aroma of that soul, its peculiar smell.  
Sebastian had always been a sucker for rare souls. And this man had a rare soul indeed. The rarest. 

Normally, when his vicitims called him, they were at the end of their tether. They were tortured souls in tortured bodies. They were broken, or breaking, mentally as well as physically. They were on their knees begging for something - anything - to stop their pain.  
Isaac, too, had been on his knees, but his pain had been.... shall we say a spiritual pain.  
Isaac was tortured by his own conscience. And the instrumtent of torture was a list of everything he had done, or failed to do, since his childhood. Every failure, big and small - and, Sebastian had to say, most were pretty small, for his personal standards - listed in ink on paper.  
It was his first year at Cambridge, a young scholar, underfunded and forced to work as subsizar. A mind like his, forced to wait table for a lesser mind.... How delightfully this must have flavored his soul!  
Newton, on his knees, sobbing, heartbroken about a list of minor imperfections, of lesser sins, of tiny sinlets. "Making a mousetrap on Thy day", "Eating an apple at Thy house", "Threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them". But his pain was as real as that of many others who had called Sebastian when their lives and souls were in more immediate danger.  
"I want to stop sinning! Please, make me stop sinning!"  
"I can promise you that. If you are willing to pay the price."  
Newton, the genius, didn't think in that moment. He only felt. And he agreed. The contract was made. Sebastian would serve him his whole life, and protect him from sin. And, in exchange, he would eat his soul - like an apple - on the day he'd die, be it Sunday or workday


	4. 1655 - the great plague

There are two types of freedom. Freedom to do, and freedom not to do. For some lesser humans, the freedom from sin that Isaac hat procured from the devil would have served as a freedom to do. A freedom to follow each and every whim, a freedom to eat and drink and be merry, a freedom to engage in crime and debauchery. For Isaac, freedom from sin was a freedom not to do. A freedom not to worry. A freedom not to regret. A freedom not to fret. A freedom not to despair. At the same time, this freedom-from gave him the mental clarity to fully engage in those things that he chose to engage in. His brilliant soul was paired with a brilliant mind, now solely dedicated to his work, with no thought spared for his body, his soul, or for society.   
This was especially pronounced now, when the plague had driven him - and all other scholars - out of Cambridge. In London, a thousand people a week succumbed to the assault of plague on their bodies and spirits. In Woolthorpe, Newton's theory of fluxions blossomed into perfection. What, to everybody else, was a cursed year, to Newton was a miracle year. His mind liberated from any fear of sin and its consequences, his body kept alive by his servant strategically placing food and liquids in Newton's proximity frequently enough to keep Newton's heart pumping blood to Newton's brain yet another day, Newton revolutionized what mankind - or at least this specific man - knew about what, at its innermost, kept the world together[1].  
There was not another soul in Isaac's mother's house in Woolthorpe, where he stayed alone with his dark and mysterious servant. Not only was it bare of other souls, it was bare of other life. Not a single rat was roaming its corridors, not a single flea was luxuriating in its carpets. Even the cats - which seemed to be more copious in number - sought out only the servant, and never the master. Isaac Newton existed in an empty, meaningless bubble, a physical and emotional vaccuum, which allowed his brain to spin without friction, spin in any direction and any speed in which Isaac's research took him.  
Maybe he would pay for this, later, some day. But today, he wasn't paying the price - he was reaping the benefit. Isaac Newton threw himself into his research with abandon, kept alive and care-free by his contract with the devil.   
Sebastian remained in the background. Keeping the man alive, while interfering as little as possible. Salivating secretly, sniffing the wonderful metallic sheen Newton's soul was developing while Newton himself was developing his theory of light, of gravity, and of everything else. 

[1] "Dass ich erkenne, was die Welt / Im Innersten zusammenhält" would, in another time and at another place, be the desire of another man making contracts with the devil.


	5. Bonus chapter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes references to sexual activity. Skip if you do not enjoy this kind of text.

Sebastian swallowed, maybe in a way a little too pronounced. His breath was steady when he got up, though, and when he dusted off the bottom half of his trousers. He wished to be able to claim he kept all floors impeccably clean, but in a country seat filled with open hearths, candles and oil lamps, even nightly scrubbing sessions would get rid only of the worst of the grime. While he, personally, was quite certain that soot sprites were apocryphal, the messy and dusty residue of heating and lighting was most certainly a fact of nature.   
"This..." Newton said, indicating, with the tiniest movement of his hand, Sebastianˋs trouser legs, "is not part of the contract, methinks."  
"No, sir. It is a little bonus, thrown in for free. But may I point out, Sir, that your tea is getting cold. And your physick will require a replenishment of liquid matters."  
Newton was too dazed to really listen, his mind already turning away from anatomical bodies and towards celestial bodies. Turning cold.... Heat. What was heat? Was it stored in the gross matter itself? In which way? In the atoms, moving through space? In the space across the atoms? Unthinkingly, he took the proferred cup and saucer, and emptied it. 

If there was one deadly sin that Sebastian was not guilty of (and, regarding deadly sins, he tended to be fairly innocent in general), it was gluttony. He would devour this soul one day, as he had devoured a tiny sample of its essence just now. But he could wait. Wait for years, for decades. In the end, it would be his. And it would be a spicy soul, well-marinated in painful experiences.


End file.
